WELCOME TO the seventh annual Wine Adviser Top 100, focused exclusively on the wines of Oregon and Washington. To compile this list I have searched through a year’s worth of tasting notes and selected one wine each — the highest scoring — from 100 different wineries. It is my goal to be inclusive, which is why every winery gets just a single spot on the list. I trust that this will give readers a better sense of the scope and depth of the region’s offerings.

The wines listed here were reviewed between November 2011 and September 2012. All told, about 2,000 wines were tasted and scored in that time. The scores are from my notes published in Wine Enthusiast magazine, for whom I am the Northwest Tasting Panel reviewer. The full reviews are available, free, online at www.winemag.com. Both score and price are considered, so within each numerical rank, the least expensive wines (based on the original suggested retail) are ranked higher because they offer better value.

Some of these wines have already sold through, but remember, the goal is to give you a broad overview of the top 5 percent of the year’s wines. Two unavoidable biases are built into the list. First is a bias toward red wines over white. I have nothing against white wines, but for whatever reason, as a group they score lower on average than red wines, and not just from me. The same is true for virtually every major reviewer in the country.

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A second bias: the list favors more expensive wines. Almost always, wines cost more when they cost more to produce. Better grapes, better barrels, better corks and bottles, more bottle age, all add to the expense of production. So there is a definite correlation between cost and quality as far as this list is concerned. That said, more than a few wines listed are $20 or less.

You will find vintages 2007 to 2011 represented here. Wineries release vintages according to their own schedule, but each is the most recent vintage for the listed wine I have tasted. Where two or more wines share the same score and price, a tie is indicated with an asterisk.